


It's Cold Outside

by DeadlyRobots



Category: Red Dwarf (UK TV)
Genre: Gen, I also imagine there are a hojillion other fics with the same title, Isolation, Observation Dome, Post-Episode: s02e02 Better Than Life, Season/Series 02, and maybe this is mostly about where we are now instead of where they were then, but it just felt apt, but this is what I felt I had to write today, maybe that slash is a bit misleading
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:49:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23509429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeadlyRobots/pseuds/DeadlyRobots
Summary: The Earth is a very long way away, and a very long time ago, and Lister is beginning to feel the isolation get to him.
Relationships: Dave Lister/Arnold Rimmer
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27





	It's Cold Outside

Lister hadn’t slept in a week. He was having trouble trusting that reality was… well, _real_.

Seven days earlier, he, Rimmer, Holly and the Cat had escaped from Better Than Life, the hyper-realistic wish-fulfillment experience specifically calibrated to give the players everything they’d ever wanted. It did this initially by allowing the player to conjure whatever person, place or thing they wanted, and later by probing deep into the players’ subconscious, to unearth desires that even they weren’t aware they’d wanted.

Unfortunately, one of the minds the game had probed was Rimmer’s, and his mind was so twisted you could've climbed to the top and slid down the edges in a large burlap sack.

They’d not been sure they’d properly escaped the game.

Twice.

That had been a week ago. Holly was quite confident this was actually reality now. He’s run tests. He wasn’t sure what the results had been, but he’d run them at least. For Rimmer, that had been good enough evidence. For Lister, though, he hadn’t quite been sure he could trust his own senses.

The mind goes places when you don’t sleep.

For Lister, the mind usually turned to thoughts of Kristine Kochanski.

Kochanski was, as far as he’d been concerned, the single most magnificent woman who’d ever lived, and that included Marie Curie, Cleopatra, and the TV weather girl from channel 27.

In another time, in another life, he’d have mustered up the courage to ask her out. Maybe they’d dated. Maybe it hadn’t lasted. But that had to be better than nothing. Than this. Pining for a dead woman who, if she were even alive, would most likely have remembered him as the bloke who’d come into the Drive Room and mess with her seat adjustment.

He went for a walk, wandering around the ship. The corridors were still marked with tyre tracks, remnants of Kryten’s epic escape a couple of months’ earlier. He’d been so proud. He imagined that’s what parenthood must feel like, seeing your children leaving the nest with all the knowledge you’ve given them, heading out into the world to make it on their own.

Kids write, though. They call. He didn’t imagine he’d ever hear from Kryten again.

He continued to walk without thinking about where he was going, and eventually found himself in the Drive Room. He’d been here several times over the last few days, mostly to check the AR helmets. He wanted to be sure they were real and not simulations. He’d come back inconclusive.

He sat in a chair, lit the cigarette that had been behind his ear for much of the day, and turned his mind, again, to Kristine.

She’d been smart, had Kristine Kochanski. On the handful of occasions he and Rimmer had been sent to the Drive Room to repair the food dispenser (dispenser 0002, nicknamed Merida for her tendency to dispense nothing but haggis whenever any other ship system malfunctioned), he’d sometimes just leaned against the wall watching her work. He had absolutely no idea what she did, but she did it quickly and, he had to assume, efficiently.

It was like watching a foreign film without subtitles. Maybe you didn’t know what was going on, maybe you weren’t entirely able to follow the narrative, but you could still appreciate the cinematography, the lighting, the score, the technical achievement on display.

He imagined it was what it must feel like to see a rabbit being pulled out of a hat if you’d never seen a rabbit before and didn’t know what a hat was.

Typically, Lister would be jolted out of watching her work by Rimmer leering over him and saying “If you have time to lean, you have time to clean!” despite the fact that exactly 0% of Lister’s job involved cleaning of any sort. He presumed Rimmer just found the rhyme clever.

Nobody had ever found that particular rhyme clever. In fact, humanity’s very first time travel experiment had involved traveling back in time and exterminating the corporate arsehole who’d _coined_ that phrase. Unfortunately killing that particular executive made them a martyr among the corporate classes, turning the phrase into a way of honoring their memory. Ironically, attempting to assassinate the phrase’s originator had been the very thing that led to its proliferation in the first place.

Humanity’s second experiment with time travel had been to travel back and warn the team behind the first experiment that the experiment was going to backfire spectacularly, however this had just been taken as proof by the first team that _their_ experiment had been successful, and they pressed on anyway.

Mankind had learned nothing from either of these experiments, but it was, at the very least, incredibly well-documented nothing.

Lister was aware of exactly none of this, happening as it had without his knowledge many decades after the accident aboard _Red Dwarf_ and, rounding up, three million years earlier than what he was doing now.

He was, right now, eyeing the AR helmets from the other side of the Drive Room. This time he wasn’t wondering whether they were real. He wasn’t thinking about taking yet another one of them apart to make sure it wasn’t a simulation before realizing he knew sod-all about AR technology and brushing the parts under the Science Room console with his foot.

This time, he was thinking about going back in.

He would later admit that this was not a rational thought. His last experience had left him a frustrated insomniac with an aversion to fruit preserves.

But it was exactly _because_ he was a frustrated insomniac that, right now, climbing back into the potentially comforting womb of the game seemed like a really, really, really, really, really good idea.

Smeg, without Rimmer’s diseased brain along for the right, he’d probably have a halfway decent time.

But that wasn’t why he was thinking of going back in. Not principally, at least.

Hell, he wasn’t even thinking about Kochanski, although the idea of growing old with her in there was deeply appealing.

No, he was thinking about Earth.

Earth, the blue marble, currently God-knows how far away from his current location. A while back they’d started referring to the space between _Red Dwarf_ and Earth in time. It would, at top speed, take only slightly less than three-million years just to get back into the solar system. Sure, by this point they’d knocked a year and a half off of the journey…

A year and a half.

It had been eighteen months since he’d been in his own solar system. It’d been even longer since he’d last been on Earth. Maybe by this point - he did some quick mental arithmetic, his brain roping in his fingers to pick up some of the slack - it’d been closer to two and a half years.

Sod the three-million. Forget that. He hadn’t seen home, from his perspective, in thirty months, or roughly the length of two-and-a-half extended-cut Peter Jackson movies.

While his mind and his hands were busy crunching numbers, his feet and his legs had other ideas, and before long Lister found himself standing in the Observation Dome, looking out to the stars.

Space.

There was certainly a lot of it.

The problem with space, Lister realized, is that it wasn’t actually there. The murky black didn’t belong to anything, it was the _absence_ of _stuff_. Humankind had, in that curious way only humans could, come up with a word to describe something that wasn’t real and couldn’t be measured.

The problem with space not being there, Lister continued to muse, was that it not being there meant that _Red Dwarf_ was, essentially, it. That’s all there was for him. That’s all there _could_ be. Alright, yes, maybe they’d stumble upon a moon or a planetoid or maybe, if they were really lucky, there’d be the odd nebula or gas giant to add splashes of color here and there.

 _But let’s be realistic,_ Lister thought. _There’s nothing out there. We’re alone._

~*~

Lister hadn’t noticed Rimmer walking up behind him, mostly because, as a hologram, Rimmer didn’t actually have any weight and wasn’t actually walking. Lister had checked once, when Rimmer wasn’t looking, and found that his bunkmate actually hovered about half a millimeter above the ground, sometimes more if he was being projected by his Light Bee and not using the internal projection systems, which were limited and rapidly breaking down after three-million years of wear and tear.

Lister knew Rimmer slept, because he knew Rimmer dreamed. He wasn’t sure how or, actually, why this occurred. It’s not like holograms _needed_ sleep. Maybe it was a force of habit. Maybe the designers of hologram technology kept sleeping in to help holograms feel normal, alive, _human_. Or maybe the human psyche is so utterly stubborn that it refuses to accept the reality of the situation and will, in defiance of science and technology and quite possibly the universe itself, always find a way to sleep in.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Rimmer asked.

“Nah,” said Lister.

“I _said_ I was sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter, don’t worry about it.”

Rimmer stepped forward to stand behind his bunkmate. He was wearing his blue-and-white striped pajamas and a regulation dressing gown with the _Red Dwarf_ logo embroidered on the breast. Lister had never seen him wear the regulation dressing down when he was alive, but he liked to think that if you were dead and could wear whatever the smeg you wanted maybe you’d have a bit more imagination than what was essentially the thing you get given for free at posh-adjacent hotels, only made out of the same stuff they made Shredded Wheat out of.

 _Wheat_ , he thought. _It’s called wheat._

“If it’s any consolation,” Rimmer offered, “And I know this won’t mean much but I thought I’d offer it. If it’s _any_ consolation… I’ve stopped having those panic attacks under the table at night.”

“Good for you,” Lister scoffed.

“This’ll pass, y’know,” said Rimmer, not for the first time. “Remember when you went into stasis? That passed like no time.”

“It passed like no time because I was experiencing _no time_ ,” said Lister. “I stepped in and you were alive, I stepped out and you were dead. If I’d known _that_ would happen I’d have gone in much sooner.”

They stood silently for a moment, as if waiting for a laugh that would never come.

“D’you ever miss it?”

“Miss what?” asked Rimmer.

“Earth.”

“Not especially,” said Rimmer. “I grew up on Io, we didn’t go to Earth very often. We had a Great Aunt who lived on one of the smaller islandy bits. We visited her once when I was six because she was having her big toe amputated. We spent what felt like eight calendar years aboard a passenger ship going direct from Io to Earth, and then we spent a week at the hospital ‘keeping her company.’” Rimmer made air quotes with his fingers.

“Why so long at the hospital?” asked Lister.

“Well, there were a number of reasons, but principally, the principal influencing factor in my parents’ decision to keep us at the hospital rather than going off on a sightseeing tour of whatever knobbly little island we were on, was that the doctors had, quite by accident, taken entirely the wrong toe.”

“Y’kiddin’.”

“They took the big toe on her right foot instead of her left. She was furious, not to mention off-balance.”

“D’you miss Io, then?” Lister asked.

“Not especially,” said Rimmer, without elaborating further.

“I miss… y’know, sometimes, I miss just walkin’ down the streets of Liverpool. Like I’d be walkin’ to a pub to see me mates, or to the shops just because I fancied a Toffee Crisp, y’know? You ever miss that? Just… going outside. Bein’ outside. Bein’ out in the world.”

Rimmer looked at nothing in particular, saying nothing.

“We’re in this ship, and we’ve got… _stuff_ , we’ve got food dispensers and movie theaters and there’s a full-size shopping center in there that I’d love to just wander around if I can convince Holly to turn off all that internal security. But it’s all so… _contained_ . I miss air. _Real_ air, not the recycled smeg we’re breathin’ now. I miss the sunshine on my face.”

“Sunshine?” Rimmer balked. “You grew up in Liverpool.”

“I just miss being… out,” said Lister, finally. “This ship is five miles long, but it may as well just be that bunk room for all the freedom we have. We’re trapped, y’know that? It’s just you and me and the Cat and that stupid smeggin’ computer. Just us, and the… the _isolation,_ y’know?”

Rimmer thought for a moment about what he could say. A number of options ran through his mind, including offering to let Lister look through his collection of classic car magazines to simulate the feeling of being in a shop. He decided against it. Lister might crease the pages.

In the back of his mind, Rimmer knew - he’d always known - that his job was to keep Lister sane. In truth, he’d never known how to do this, but’d had confidence in Holly’s decision and opted to just continue being himself until something else sprung to mind.

A year and a half later, he still hadn’t figured out what to do. And now, Lister was actually, actively opening up… and he had nothing.

Rimmer’s tank, which already spent the majority of its time surviving on drips, drops and fumes, was empty.

He reached out to pat Lister’s back before remembering he couldn’t, then turned and headed back toward the stairs.

 _Maybe I’ll think of something tomorrow,_ he thought.

He wouldn’t. Instead, he’d be Rimmer; annoying, controlling, complaining.

Lister stayed and looked at the stars a little longer.

Tomorrow would look rather a lot like today. He’d grown used to that. But that didn’t mean things would _always_ be like that.

He remembered something his Nan had said when he was very little. When she wasn’t picking fights at her local or threatening Lister’s teachers she was, from time to time, quite insightful.

She’d said, “Hope is important. You’ve got to have hope. If you give someone jam today, they’ll just sit there and eat it. But jam tomorrow? That’ll keep you going forever.”

As a kid, Lister never quite understood what she meant because, like all children, he was fixated on the idea that tomorrow never actually came.

As an adult, however, he realized that sometimes - not often, not always, but sometimes - tomorrow would arrive after all. You just had to get through enough todays to make it happen, and today doesn’t always stay the same.

Eventually, Lister headed back to his room, lay his head on his pillow, and slept.

Tomorrow was another day.

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks and apologies, not necessarily in that order, to the late, great Terry Pratchett. Jam tomorrow.


End file.
